But of all the colonists of this region the least prosperous are the Jews.  The Chosen People are certainly a most intelligent, industrious, frugal race, and in all matters of buying, selling, and bartering they are unrivalled among the nations of the earth, but they have been too long accustomed to town life to be good tillers of the soil.  These Jewish colonies were founded as an experiment to see whether the Israelite could be weaned from his traditionary pursuits and transferred to what some economists call the productive section of society.  The experiment has failed, and the cause of the failure is not difficult to find.  One has merely to look at these men of gaunt visage and shambling gait, with their loop-holed slippers, and black, threadbare coats reaching down to their ankles, to understand that they are not in their proper sphere.  Their houses are in a most dilapidated condition, and their villages remind one of the abomination of desolation spoken of by Daniel the Prophet.  A great part of their land is left uncultivated or let to colonists of a different race.  What little revenue they have is derived chiefly from trade of a more or less clandestine nature.*

* Mr. Arnold White, who subsequently visited some of these Jewish Colonies in connection with Baron Hirsch’s colonisation scheme, assured me that he found them in a much more prosperous condition.

As Scandinavia was formerly called officina gentium—­a workshop in which new nations were made—­so we may regard Southern Russia as a workshop in which fragments of old nations are being melted down to form a new, composite whole.  It must be confessed, however, that the melting process has as yet scarcely begun.

National peculiarities are not obliterated so rapidly in Russia as in America or in British colonies.  Among the German colonists in Russia the process of assimilation is hardly perceptible.  Though their fathers and grandfathers may have been born in the new country, they would consider it an insult to be called Russians.  They look down upon the Russian peasantry as poor, ignorant, lazy, and dishonest, fear the officials on account of their tyranny and extortion, preserve jealously their own language and customs, rarely speak Russian well—­sometimes not at all—­and never intermarry with those from whom they are separated by nationality and religion.  The Russian influence acts, however, more rapidly on the Slavonic colonists—­Servians, Bulgarians, Montenegrins—­who profess the Greek Orthodox faith, learn more easily the Russian language, which is closely allied to their own, have no consciousness of belonging to a Culturvolk, and in general possess a nature much more pliable than the Teutonic.